Despite record setting returns last year, all’s not right with the Fraser River’s sockeye run. Since the mid-1990s, something began killing large numbers of returning reds on the Fraser — anywhere from 40 to 95 percent of fish in some years — before they could spawn.

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Check this out…the Fraser River in British Columbia had a mind-boggling sockeye salmon return this summer: an estimated 30 plus million fish came back this year, the largest run since 1913! Even more amazing is the fact that only 1.7 million fish swam into the Fraser last season!

Jay Kennedy did his best to put a dent in the massive red salmon invasion and ended up with this ‘slab 12 pounder, which is a jumbo sockeye (most are 5-8 pounds) and our latest Hawg of the Month Contest entry. Sockeye are such good fighters that you’d probably never land one if they got up to 20 or 30 pounds! He caught the fish near Chilliwack, which is upstream on the Fraser from Vancouver, while bottom bouncing wool. That’s the Canadian way of saying “drift fishing with yarn” by the way.

Something good’s up with the Columbia River. I’m not sure if it has to do with those spring pulse flows to flush out smolts that they’ve been doing recently…good ocean conditions…or a combination thereof, but the river’s been stuffed with fish the past couple years. If you’ll recall, the summer run steelhead numbers were through the roof in 2009 and the coho run was also massive. Now you can add sockeye to the list.

So far this year, over 350,000 sockeye salmon have made it over Bonneville Dam, three times the amount predicted by biologists and a modern-day record. And the run’s not over yet. Read more HERE